'Jingoism has become fashionable'

'Our viewers have grown up over the years.' 'Today, they want to see something which is sensible, a story rooted in logic rather than jingoism.'

He started out as the quintessential bad boy of Bollywood, in films like Footpath, Murder, Jannat and Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai and impressed us with his care-a-damn swag and histrionics.

But in the two decades since, Emraan Hashmi has grown up and been walking the straight and narrow path.

This year, he went rogue again with a vengeance.

As Aatish Rehman, the ex-deputy director general of the ISI who is planning to assassinate the Pakistan prime minister and occupy her chair, he added a new dimension to Salman Khan's Tiger franchise in its third instalment taking it into 2023's Top 10 hit list.

Tiger 3's Aatish Rehman has not only redefined the bad man in Hindi cinema but also geo-politics in the subcontinent. Unlike several films in the past which have happily cashed in on bashing Pakistan, the enemy in this case is clearly the individual rather than the country.

Yes, we have had films ringing a kind of forced jingoism which has become fashionable today.

Showing the 'other' in a black-and-white kind of scenario is predictable, but in all areas of life things function in shades of gray.

So the audience has appreciated us for underlining that this man's ideology does not reflect the ideology of a country and its people, and by country, I don't mean just Pakistan.

Our viewers have grown up over the years, more so with the proliferation of OTT platforms.

Today, they want to see something which is sensible, a story rooted in logic rather than jingoism.

That is not to say that those films don't work at the box office, they definitely do, but had we done the same, Tiger 3 would have been just another film.